start with a firework (an impactful win that can get people excited), followed by some quick fixes (‘you need to make some stuff work surprisingly well, surprisingly quickly and cheaply’), then move rapidly out of innovation and fireworks into fixing the basics (‘transforming the basic reality of the organization’), and focus on fundamentals such as digital infrastructure (hiring, procurement, contracts, management), analytics and measurement (including tracking key indicators), organizational blockers, governance and reporting (‘an essential element of transformation is likely to be dissolving the existing corporate silos – that can’t be done from within one of them’), and of course, culture.
Stories from the frontline
Russell Davies: Prioritization in digital transformation
If you’re really doing digital transformation, you have to do everything first.
Everything’s connected. So you have to do everything.
Some things will happen first, but you have to start as much as you can as soon as you can.
So, for instance, the plan to transform government publishing with GOV.
UK was part of a larger plan to transform government services as a whole.
That was prioritized since it was thought to be relatively quick, cheap and easy to do. It would be very visible and would reach a lot of people.
Within the GOV.UK project itself there were then many other
prioritization decisions that were informed by a mixture of easiness and impact. And those changed over time.
What you prioritize for the alpha – when you’re learning what to do and trying to persuade people to let you do it – is different to when you have full control and you’re grinding through the programme. For the alpha, things that Ministers would immediately care about were prioritized. Once their backing was secured, then came the stuff that would really matter.
On the whole we optimized for momentum – it was known that eventually the machine would wake up and try to slow things down, so we tried to change as much as we could as quickly as possible, so it would be harder to unpick.
And then, inside the project itself there were a ton of decisions: What services do we start with? Which departments should go first? It’s fractal – priorities within priorities. Eventually you solve that by trusting the team
Prioritization via impact and effort is not new, but becomes particularly important when the requirement is to demonstrate early value in a digi-tal transformation programme. Put simply, showing big impact in a short space of time buys you more time, particularly if you can show the tangible benefit not just to the business but also from the perspective of the customer (nobody can argue with customer data). As well as impact and effort, a third dimension to prioritization is, of course, time. As Dwight D Eisenhower famously said:
What is important is seldom urgent, and what is urgent is seldom important.
The Eisenhower matrix (Figure 9.1) is a simple but powerful way of balanc-ing these two criteria to define what we should pay attention to first.
It is, of course, important that we ensure we are not constantly ignoring or scheduling for later development priorities that might not be urgent now, but are fundamentally important for long-term capability or advancement.
doing it. You describe some outcomes, emphasize some things over others (MOMENTUM!) and let them work out their own delivery priorities. Setting specific priorities at every level is counter-productive, it becomes a version of waterfall or (dread phrase) a Target Operating Model.
And, of course, zooming out again, if you’re doing proper transformation you can’t set these priorities in isolation. In order to transform publishing you need digital specialists, which means you need to hire different people, which means you need to change the HR practices, which means you need to change hiring guidelines and recruit different HR people and rewrite all the ads and find a way round the salary restrictions. And you have to give people the right tools which means you have to persuade IT to allow people internet access and to change accounting practices so people can use a government purchasing card to sign up to Heroku ($99, 30 seconds) rather than use the single source hosting contract ($ millions, months). That’s all at the apparently trivial level, but it actually makes a huge difference. And at a more apparently ‘transformational’ level you probably have to fire, disempower, or sidestep the existing IT organization and their suppliers. Which may well mean changing the composition of the board. You’ll probably have to change the way procurement works and re-educate them about what a good IT contract looks like. You might need to extract all kinds of digital stuff from the marketing and sales organization.
It goes on and on.
Ring fencing resource and allocating to short- and long-term needs helps mitigate this, and simple scorecard approaches (including, for example, an assessment of customer impact, risk, cost, time and profit contribution) can be highly effective in prioritizing development. Any broader innova-tion or transformainnova-tion programme can be significantly undermined by poor, nonsensical service design and delivery and so fixing basic but poorly designed customer or product experiences and unnecessary barriers to seam-less customer journeys can often be a powerful driver for change. Remember, innovation is no substitute for basic competence.
Clarity of roadmap ownership and governance, robust prioritization methodologies and capacity planning against set criteria are essential to prevent capacity overload and development precedence being given to inap-propriate internal priorities (like from those who shout loudest) rather than those that make sense for the customer.
But when is it not right to listen to our customers? It is, of course, a myth that Apple do not do research, but Steve Jobs famously described the limita-tions of customer feedback when designing the new:
It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.
Henri Seydoux, Founder and CEO of technology and drone business Parrot describes how there are times when they have no consideration of the user, and other times when they are extremely sensitive to user need:
Urgent
Importance
Do it now
Delegate Schedule for
later
Eliminate High
Low High
figure 9.1 The Eisenhower matrix
When your idea is totally new, you cannot ask the user… if you ask people to dream with you, they not will understand with you, or the dream will not be serious.18
Seydoux relates the story of how an idea for a connected picture frame rapidly became overcomplicated by focus groups who relayed all kinds of additional features that they wanted to the point where it became untenable.
Yet for a developing or existing market, continuous customer feedback is key. As Clay Christensen said:
Working harder, being smarter, investing more aggressively, and listening more astutely to customers are all solutions to the problems posed by new sustaining technologies. But these paradigms of sound management are useless – even counterproductive, in many instances – when dealing with disruptive technology.19 The secret is to design with vision and optimize with feedback.